Echopraxia

ECHOPRAXIA (from the Greek echo-sound and praxis - action), imitative automatism, the tendency of certain mentally ill patients to passively and automatically repeat the movements and actions of other people. E. can be expressed with varying intensity: more often the patient repeats only relatively elementary movements (for example raising the hand, clapping hands), which are performed with a certain impressiveness before his eyes, while in rarer cases everything that, for example, a neighboring patient does is repeated. One form of E. is echolalia - the automatic repetition of heard words, produced either by weaving individual words reaching the patient's ears into his own speech or by meekly repeating exclusively what is said before him. Echolalia is particularly often expressed in patients repeating questions addressed to them instead of answering. As Kraepelin pointed out, the automaticity and mechanical nature of echopractic manifestations does not deprive patients of the ability to a certain degree to understand and process the corresponding impressions, so that for example a patient, automatically repeating numbers pronounced before him, simultaneously performs, although apparently just as automatically, the solution of operations that must be performed with them. Some authors consider that E. is related to the tendency to imitation, characteristic of children, and that it represents the product of execution of primitive volitional impulses, in which imitation is an end in itself and which in the course of development undergo inhibition, and by the pathological process are again released. Most often and in the most typical form echopraxia is observed in schizophrenics, but some of its forms are also found in those suffering from organic brain diseases, such as the phenomena of autoechopraxia, i.e. the repetition of one's own movements and words; these include polylalia, multiple, involuntary repetition of the same syllable or word, sometimes observed in postencephalitic parkinsonism.